1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an Open Wireless Architecture (OWA) Unified Airborne and Terrestrial Communications architecture with open radio transmission technologies between aircrafts and ground cells, and between different aircrafts in ad-hoc or mesh network manner to build the unified broadband information delivery platform across the airborne networks and the terrestrial networks wherein the same OWA mobile device can be used seamlessly and continuously both in the aircrafts and on the ground.
2. Description of the Related Art
Commercial wireless mobile communications including terrestrial cellular network and airborne network have been developed for long time. However, their architecture remains very closed, especially the airborne network technology is still in the earlier dates.
As the ground networking technology is expanding to the space domain which is to develop the next generation Internet technology for the ground-air infrastructure, a unified airborne and terrestrial networking solution becomes the mission-critical demand for everyone in the industry.
The current airborne communications have the following fatal problems:                a. Transmission speed is too slow, and both transmission and system architectures are too closed;        b. Too much relying on Satellite communications which are too expensive to be used in commercial environment;        c. It is too difficult to ensure the radio transmission safety issue for the traditional wireless device used in commercial aircrafts, and therefore all such wireless devices must be turned off in the aircrafts;        d. Some available non-satellite based transmission technology for airborne network is very much limited to certain specific wireless standard only without the capability to support the overall requirements of the future airborne communications;        e. There is no solution available for seamless connections across the terrestrial networks and the airborne networks.        
The above problems exist in the prior arts as follows:
1. Satellite-Based Airborne Networks
This technology has been in the industry for about 50 years. However, satellite equipments both in aircrafts and skies are very expensive, and because of power issues in the satellite, the transmission speed is must limited which is not a cost-effective solution in providing broadband connections for users in the aircrafts. In addition, most commercial mobile devices do not support satellite communications except a purely broadcasting satellite receiver.
Commercial networks require both cost-effective and performance-efficient solution among the features of transmission speed, mobility handover and network capacity. Satellite network has problems in cost issue and transmission speed issue, and therefore is not appropriate for commercial applications.
2. Land-Based VHF/UHF Airborne Networks
This solution was proposed in 1960s for the airborne networks. However, VHF (very high frequency) and UHF (Ultra high frequency) are mostly used for terrestrial broadcasting (one way) services and there are not enough two-way transceivers on the ground. Furthermore, VHF/UHF has been already used by airline industry for airborne radio, navigation information and flight information mostly in the form of voice, text, fax and short video, etc. In addition, the transmission speed over VHF/UHF channel is quite limited, and not appropriate for broadband high-speed connections between the aircrafts and the ground.
3. Land-Based CDMA-EVDO Airborne Network
This solution was proposed by Aircell and other companies which use one CDMA (code division multiplex access) technology to connect the aircrafts with the ground cellular towers. Though the CDMA EVDO (Evolution-Data Optimized) standard has many cellular towers in some regions, this solution has the following two fatal problems:                a. The transmission is limited to EVDO-CDMA only without being able to connect to other wireless standards in different regions or countries without EVDO;        b. Because CDMA has many problems in maintaining the high network capacity and high-speed transmission, etc in the airborne communication environment, this single solution is hard to compliment between the network capacity and the transmission speed in a commercial environment;        
Furthermore, in the above solution, there is no transmission safety control scheme in the airborne in-flight connections, and so various wireless equipments supporting WiMax and PCS, etc are used in the aircrafts which generate a serious radio interference problems with the airborne/aviation navigation and airborne/aviation communication systems. Such separate radio transmission technologies in the closed architecture without an efficient control will not work at all in the commercial airborne networks.
4. SDR Based Airborne Network
Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology was used for airborne network in 1990s which supports multiple wireless standards in the aircraft-ground connections. Though it has been used already by the military applications, it has never been used successfully in commercial environment, because:                a. SDR is primarily a radio in which the preset operating parameters including inter alia frequency range, modulation type, and/or output power limitations can be reset or altered by software in order to support different radio frequency bands and/or standards. Though SDR has been improved a lot to support re-configurability and flexibility, it is a closed architecture in coupling different radios into one broadband transceiver. In other words, SDR consumes much more power and spectrum in exchange of the system flexibility. From the business point of view, SDR is not a cost-effective solution in wireless communications;        b. Furthermore, SDR uses broadband transceiver to support multiple wireless standards which is very expensive in the commercial environment;        c. The SDR device will lose synchronization across the airborne network and the terrestrial network because of its closed architecture in both systems and transmissions.        
Therefore, this solution is also not appropriate for the commercial airborne networks.
In conclusion, all of these known systems fail to meet one or more of the following goals for the airborne network connections:                a. To provide a cost effective way in securing high-speed transmission, lossless handover and high network capacity in a commercial environment;        b. To provide a seamless and continuous connection between the terrestrial network and the in-flight network;        c. To support open radio transmission technologies in different regions and service areas in both aircraft-to-ground and ground-to-aircraft links;        d. To synchronize the mobile device across the airborne network and the terrestrial network;        e. To provide a fully flight-safe connections for the in-flight wireless network and automatically turn-off the terrestrial radio transceivers of the mobile devices when in the in-flight network.        
This invention provides a system and method that achieves these goals very well.
The present invention is based on a technology called Open Wireless Architecture (OWA) platform. OWA is different from SDR (software defined radio) as OWA basically maps various wireless standards into open interface parameters and maintain the system platform including RF, baseband, networks and applications an open architecture. Hence, in OWA systems, different modules (both hardware and software) can be from different vendors. It is similar to the open computer architecture in personal computer system and open network architecture in packet router system.
SDR uses broadband transceiver to support multiple wireless standards which is very expensive in the commercial environment. However, OWA converges multiple air interfaces (or called wireless standards or radio transmission technologies—RTTs) in an open system platform to maximize the transmission bandwidth and system performance, but each wireless transmission still uses the narrowband transceiver, therefore maintaining the system in a cost-effective way which is very important for the commercial business.
By using OWA technology, we can converge multiple wireless standards in one open system to support both broadband high-speed radio transmission and seamless fast mobility capability in a mobile fast-fading propagation model environment while maintaining the very high mobile network capacity for the commercial mobile business.
In addition, OWA allows allocating multiple air interfaces into an external card so that the users can simply change wireless standards by updating such air interface card without having to change the mobile device or mobile terminal system.
Based on the research report (released on Feb. 11, 2010) by Berkeley Wireless Research Center, University of California at Berkeley, three most important and critical issues in wireless communication terminal device are in power & energy, radio spectrum and open wireless architecture (OWA). As long as we have the OWA system, it can help improve the energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency greatly. This is extremely important for the future converged networks between the terrestrial network and the airborne network, and between the wireless access network and the mobile cellular network, and further between the wireless network and wireline network.
We will explain in more details in the following sections.